Why I've stopped reading White Noise

I read further yesterday in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) but have reached the end of my patience. As noted yesterday, the 2^nd section of the book, in which the narrator (Jack) and his family are evacuated from their home and go through treacherous drive in a snowstorm to escape from a deadly toxic cloud, is a powerful and a weirdly prescient stretch of writing. But then in part 3, the toxic spill behind them (and 9 days of living in an emergency shelter dispatched in one sentence) , DeLillo’s back to his old bag of tricks and the novel veers off course: lots of eccentric dialog, fun to read up to a point but what’s the point. The point is that Jack’s wife, Babette, has secretly been taking off-the-grid, unapproved medication called Dylar. Jack goes to unusual lengths – enlisting the help of a scientist who’s a colleague in his college – to find out what Dylar does. At last, Babette begins to explain everything to him. She has, she tells him, developed a mordant fear of death; she saw in a supermarket tabloid an ad for willing participants in a medical trial of a drug to alleviate this condition. She’s been taking the drug for years, and as part of her “treatment” has for years been engaged in a sexual tryst w/ the doctor leading the experiment. Nothing, nothing about this makes any sense on a literal level; no woman in her right mind – no woman like this shrewd and hyperintelligent Babette – would engage in such harmful and ludicrous behavior, and no husband as vigilant and faithful as Jack would miss the signs. I could accept all this is there were a point to it, but so far as I can see it’s just more vamping and hyperventialting about an all-pervasive dread that permeates life in the late 20^th century – today as well in some respects, but at this point I’ve just lost patience w/ this novel, which has so many excellent passages but which seems to me to have no shape or direction. DeLillo has his passtionate devotees, but I find that the characters, with their dark, sometimes idiosyncratic world view, obstruct the plot rather than ground and advance it.